In this moving memoir, a young Polish Jew chronicles his life under the Nazis. In the vain hope of protecting himself and his family, Calel Perechodnik made the wrenching decision to become a ghetto policeman in a small town near Warsaw. The true tragedy of his choice becomes clear when during the Aktion he must witness his own wife and child forced to board a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. Filled with loathing for the Germans, the Poles, his Jewish brethren, and himself, Perechodnik fled the ghetto to shelter with a Polish woman in Warsaw. In the course of 105 terror-filled days in hiding, he poured out his poignant story. Written while Nazi boots pounded the streets of the neighborhood and while his tortured memory was painfully fresh, this memoir has a rare immediacy and raw power. Shortly before his death in 1944, he entrusted the precious diary to a Polish friend. The document was eventually deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. Left nearly forgotten for half a century, it was finally published in Poland in 1993. We owe a great debt to historian Frank Fox for bringing us this sensitive translation, which reminds us anew of the power and truth of historical memory.

Great historians have seldom described the notable events in which they themselves participated. Marc Bloch - author of Feudal Society, the classic study of medieval social systems and co-founder of the influential French historical journal Annales - is an exception, In his powerful memoir The Strange Defeat, he analysed the fall of France in 1940 from the viewpoint of combatant as well as historian. And in his Memoirs of War, 1914-15, here in its first English translation (originally published in hard covers in 1980 by Cornell University Press), Bloch left a keen and affecting account of his earliest experience of war. Carole Fink's introduction includes a brief biography of Bloch, discusses the effect of the war upon his intellectual development, and assesses his achievements as a historian. Though Bloch survived the savage trench warfare of the First World War, he was shot by a Gestapo firing squad in 1944 for his participation in the Resistance. Trenchant, inspiring, and tersely written, Memoirs of War, 1914-15 is a monument to a great scholar and fierce patriot.